Over the last century, the widespread use of liquid fossil fuels as resulted in substantial industrial progress. Notwithstanding current efforts to conserve the world's petroleum resources and to use alternative energy sources such as coal, nuclear, solar, geothermal, and the like, fuel obtained from oil remains our main energy source for everything from vehicles and home heating plants to our largest industrial facilities.
As its use has increased, fossil fuels such as oil, has been the source of much industrial and urban pollution. For example, during combustion, incomplete combustion of the fuel produces toxic carbon monoxide and other harmful emissions. The electric spark and high temperatures also allow oxygen and nitrogen to react and form nitrogen monoxide and nitrogen dioxide, which are responsible for photochemical smog and acid rain. Furthermore, though once very abundant and inexpensive, oil has recently become a very expensive commodity and, because it is a non-renewable resource, oil will become ever more scarce in the future. Our use of it is so universal that even the most optimistic predictions of achieving transition to alternatives forecast many years of high consumption.
Accordingly, efforts have been directed to improving the performance of machinery using fossil fuels or liquid hydrocarbon fuels, for example, by increasing the miles per gallon of automobiles. In part this has involved redesign of the machinery which uses the fuel. Another tactic has been to change the combustion characteristics of the fuel itself by refining and by the use of additives. Although there have been substantial efforts made to improve hydrocarbon fuels by supplementing them with various additives, these efforts have not enjoyed widespread acceptance or much success because of one shortcoming or another. Accordingly, there has long been, and still remains, a need for an inexpensive yet effective additive for liquid fossil fuels to provide cleaner combustion and fuel improve efficiency. It would be desirable to utilize fuel additive that, when added to fossil fuels, uses less fuel, produces reduced emissions while maintaining the same BTU output during combustion. It is a primary object of my invention to provide such a fuel additive.